In praise of Things - and the dedicated craftsmanship it takes to create them
Superior design and craftsmanship can still represent a competitive edge
Chancellor Angela Merkel was once asked by a group of international dignitaries about her thoughts on Germany, and which of Germany’s numerous modern achievements she was most proud about. She pondered, and then said: “I think of airtight windows. No other country can build such nice and airtight windows.”
Her audience was astonished, having expected her to praise her country’s lofty social idealism or its great strides in achieving postwar Europe’s most stable democracy. They needn’t have been - for Angela Merkel was nothing if not a practical stateswoman, and German windows ARE the best in the world.
For one, they are automatically double-glazed. They don’t allow for a draught. And their sophisticated hinge technology allows them to be tilted, or fully opened, as you wish. All houses and apartments have these windows. In fact, by law all windows (and many doors) MUST have these circumferential rubber joints and frames designed to keep the warmth inside a building. They’re brilliant. Angela Merkel was justifiably proud of them. They’re just not very common outside German-speaking Europe.
The substance of German buildings is generally high, as anybody who has spent any time in countries like the UK can testify. There, separate hot and cold water taps, along with the absence of plug sockets in the bathroom, will be the least of your problems. Germans don’t have those inconveniences any more. The overall building quality of modern German housing is of a higher order. But will it stay that way?
We were moved recently by a thoughtful article by prominent Berlin architect Eike Becker. He was travelling in southern England, and was overcome with admiration for the horticultural wonders the British had created over the centuries, gathering the most diverse plants from the four corners of the earth to produce lush garden art that was able to thrive in Britain’s mild and humid climate.
By contrast, he said, he hardly found a bed-and-breakfast where cold dampness was not climbing up the outside walls, rickety sash windows were not held in place by makeshift pieces of wood, while the ramshackle electric wiring represented a permanent fire hazard. Rainwater downpipes were affixed haphazardly across facades in an obvious attempt to save time and money. How, he wondered, could the creators of such virtuoso garden art have allowed the simplest building craft and artisan traditions to wither almost completely away in a matter of a few decades?
A few weeks later, in Vorarlberg, Austria, he was confronted with the opposite situation. There are no big manor houses or landscaped gardens. But the villages, farms and houses are connected to their natural surrounding in the best traditions of craftsmanship, with the wooden buildings designed, like their predecessors, to last for a hundred years. The artistry of the local craftsmen and their close collaboration with architects and designers, skillfully integrating sustainable and material-appropriate processes into local projects, is what helps make this happen. Their large halls on the edges of the village - the carpenters and joiners, the plumbers and the plasterers, the electricians and the bricklayers - are testimony to the role they play in the local community and in the regional culture.
Germany, on the other hand, finds itself at a crossroads, caught somewhere between these two worlds, says Becker. In the southern part of the country, craftsmen and their skills are still highly appreciated. Germany’s approach to vocational training still enjoys a degree of prestige throughout many European countries, where structural deficits have led to many practical skills dying out. These companies and workers are in demand, and could find plenty of work outside their own home markets.
But Becker makes a valuable point. The construction industry increasingly relies on cheap labour from southeast Europe. In countries like the UK, France and the Netherlands, neither the project developers nor the architects, all likely graduates of the university academic system, fully value the skills of the craftsmen, with whom they’ve had little contact. The trained engineers working for general contractors, who end up dishing out the contracts, are left to outsource the work to more or less unskilled sub-contractors.
As a result, the pressure on general contractors in Germany is now so great that the temptation to cut corners is almost irresistible. They shave costs to the detriment of the building quality, a “fast-food architecture” heading in the wrong direction, in Becker’s eyes. As a result, quality craft companies are often underfinanced, cannot attract enough workers, and can’t afford to innovate. The trade is dividing up into large enterprises on the one hand, and solopreneurs on the other. These one-man-bands are less and less able to skill up to meet the highest standards of their craft, while the large enterprises are run along similar lines to their industrial peers. In both cases the connection to the established craft sector and its organisations is weakening, at the cost of quality.
This all matters, because for the next few years the reality in the German real estate industry will see less of the swashbuckling deal-making, and more of the grinding asset and property management tasks, nursing potentially inefficient buildings back to a new, useful life with a reasonable energy rating. Few people - apart from some sharp-elbowed opportunists - are going to be making a fortune in German real estate in the next few years. Avoiding losing a lot of money will come to be seen, in many cases, as a win.
Germany has a prickly path to tread, as it negotiates its way from being an industrial, manufacturing nation dependent on its export markets, to also being a digitally-driven, service-oriented economy - a transition which doesn’t always sit comfortably with its traditional strengths. The much-hyped Internet of Things, that interconnectivity between the digital world and physical appliances, or Things, is still some way short of becoming reality.
But Germany is still rightly revered for its meticulous production standards, and its manufacturers still make great Things. Like the best windows in the world. Nervous investors should remember that superior craftsmanship can still represent a vital competitive advantage.